Toronto Int’l TrainingChild-Parent Somatic Psychotherapy

Child-Parent Somatic PsychotherapyInternational Training Program

A new groundbreaking program with Ruella Frank
and the Gestalt Institute of Toronto

Teaching practitioners to intervene at the earliest phases of social
development through an understanding of movement.

Level One:
DATES
April 12-14, 2019 & September 20-22, 2019

FEE$850 CAD / $700 USD

Level Two:
DATES
January 10-12, 2020 & June 19-21, 2020

FEE$850 CAD / $700 USD

LOCATION
To Be Announced

TIMES
To Be Announced

This program is recommended for psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, occupational therapists, movement educators and nurses who work with or are interested in working with parents and children from 0-3 years. Graduates of psychotherapy training institutes who are interested in applying early developmental theory to the therapist-client inter-relationship also are welcome.

About the training:

From the worlds of neuroscience, psychiatry, and developmental psychology, it now is clearly known that the earliest phases of a child’s life sets the ground for later relational experiences. Human qualities of respect, empathy and commitment to another are forged during this important period of time.

Although wanting the best for their child, inadvertently and all too often, parents bring emotional challenges and vulnerabilities from their own experiences of being parented into their relationship with their infants and children. Perhaps they were neglected or abused or chronically mis-attuned to and now struggle with how to parent an infant or young child when the model of “good enough” parenting was not available to them. Such unresolved difficulties hamper parents’ abilities to sensitively caretake their child. This creates dissatisfactions on each side of the equation. Working with parents and their children (0-3 years), can ameliorate the kinds of difficulties that diminish satisfying relationships for each member of the family, while preventing the transmission of early psychological wounds passed down from one generation to the next.

Using a movement-oriented approach to analyze and treat the child-parent developing relationship, the CPSP program explores the subtle yet profound movement exchanges that shape and underlie our earliest patterns of attaching and demonstrates how specific movement experiences become self and relation experiences and vice versa.

When practitioners attend to their patients through movement, they are working at a primary and fundamental level that precedes and underlies later developing language and sophisticated cognitive capacities.

Of interest to people of all backgrounds, the CPSP training program will enhance your perception of human movement by revealing how nonverbal patterns, developed in the relationship with significant others, become the implicit core of adult functioning.

A certificate of continuing education will be issued at the completion of the two year program. The practical experience with parents and children will require supervised practice; supervision can be arranged individually with Ruella Frank.

Guest Faculty
Ruella Frank, PhD, founder and director of The Center for Somatic Studies, brings her lifetime of exploration of early infant movements and their relationship to the adult, which has influenced psychotherapeutic approaches throughout the world. She is author of books and articles introducing her embodied, relational and development approach including Body Of Awareness (2001, Gestalt Press). Ruella is introducing this new groundbreaking program (CPSP) in partnership with the Gestalt Institute of Toronto which welcomes her as an ongoing guest faculty.

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Our courses, DSP trainings, workshops, and lectures have been taught in the following cities: